Tom swift and the Captive Planetoid (21 page)

“And we’ve yet to see how much flying it’ll do,” Tom added. His pulse was racing feverishly. The most crucial part of the job lay ahead. The readout counters were clicking off trajectory figures. “For a pinpoint landing, I’ll have to veer Petronius northward by two and a half degrees and flatten its glide angle almost four degrees.”

“What happens if you overshoot?” Bud asked. “I mean, some people really
like
Provo!”

“The wing mounts carry small explosive charges. At worst I can always blow the wing. But it’d be choosing the better of two catastrophes, pal.” Tom’s fingers twirled the transifoil control knobs. On the monitor screen, the wing tips began to curve—one up, one down—as the nose lifted.

“She’s banking, Tom!” Bud cried out.

Slowly but surely, the planetoid was tilting and shifting course. Tom’s lips shaped the ghost of a grin. No doubt about it, he was bringing in Petronius dead on target!

As the planetoid’s plunge continued, he made two more delicate corrections, then arced the wing to act more like a parachute to radically slow the final stages of the plunge. Perspiration beaded Tom’s forehead. This was the point of greatest stress on the struts and cables, and the body of the wing itself. If the apparatus were torn free, the captive planetoid would thunder to earth with devastating effect!

“She’s holding,” stated Hank Sterling with a near-whisper.

“Little Brother’s over Nevada,” Tom noted. “We can start saying
uprange
now.”

A few more minutes, and Petronius had dropped beneath the stratosphere, zooming along at Mach 2 and approaching the Utah state border. Tom made a final change to the shape of the wing. “Flying like a jet. The plasma grab-fluxors are—” Suddenly his eyes flickered with dismay. “Power fluctuation!”

“Critical?” asked Hanson.

“I can compensate. Time for the wing to grow some flaps—but we’ll get serious vibration problems.”

“Like they say—I kin relate!” gasped Chow.

One side of the curving bunker bore a huge, thick observation window nearly fifty feet high, which Enterprises workers had reinforced with metallumin. Now the many watchers could see a strange, fierce light slowly rising from behind the western horizon. And then a fiery speck with a long brilliant tail rose into view against the stars of early evening. “Slowing,” whispered Tom. “Slowing...”

The young inventor’s face was almost triumphant, but his voice rang hollow with anxiety. Bud turned his gray eyes upon his friend and grasped his arm reassuringly.

There was nothing more to be done. Tom’s duratherm wing had finished its job. Only seconds remained before the streaking mass would crash to earth. The watchers in the bunker froze in suspense, hunching into crash-ready positions.

The fantastic space visitor filled the western sky and spread a multicolored daylight over the desert and its twenty-mile landing strip. “Welcome to Earth,” Tom whispered.

The impact came like an earthquake!

SOME of the mission control team were flung off their feet. Others managed to stay upright by clawing the wall or clinging to equipment. The pictures on the monitor screens wavered and dissolved into snow—but not before Tom had seen the planetoid gouge into the earth with the explosive brilliance of a thunderbolt!

The touchdown was too bright to be watched directly through the observation window, but the cameras captured it for history. The looming D-Wing ripped free of its base and seemed to billow outward in a glowing, fiery cloud as it absorbed the tremendous impact energy. In the same instant, the last traces of the shell of rock crust shattered and fragmented, exposing the huge blue core of sapphire!

“
R-rolling!
” exclaimed Arv Hanson.

Petronius managed to tumble over twice. But its bottom had already sunken a hundred feet into the desert surface, and its residual energy was quickly expended. Suddenly, beneath a lowering canopy of fire, all was still.

There was a long, heart-gripping interval while the earth tremor died away. The group in the bunker exchanged awed, triumphant glances. Tom raised his PER unit to his lips. “Enterprises—Dad—we have touchdown.”

“You did it, Skipper!” Hank said huskily.

Bud and Chow shakily hugged their friend. “Can we go out and take a look?” Bud asked. The view window was smeared with clingy black ash, which floated down from the night sky.

Tom shook his head, still breathless with relief and excitement. “Not yet. We’d better wait till the heat wave cools off. But I can tell you one thing. Utah still exists!”

Chow whooped. “Not t’ mention Texas!”

“I figured you’d get around to that, pardner.”

Tom continued to talk with his father. “Son, I—I hardly know what to say. You’ve performed a tremendous feat—and a tremendous service to your country! To the world!”

“And to science, I hope. Everything went so smoothly, I can hardly believe it. Has any damage been reported?”

“Nothing grave. Word of windows being shattered in Provo and Salt Lake City. I’d say you brought Petronius down to earth with surgical precision.”

For an hour Tom watched the outside-air temperature gauge. Slowly the needle sank back to normal.

“Okay. It should be safe enough out there now. The ground itself will be hot, remember.” Tom pressed a button. A steel shutter covering the door to the bunker slid open.

The eager group swarmed out into the desert air, which smelled of some pungent odor and was draped in wisps of smoke. One by one, they stopped in sheer amazement at the sight that met their eyes. Heavy-lensed floodlights, shock-mounted in the desert floor, were still blazing. In their brilliant radiance, the enormous sky sapphire seemed to glow with blue fire!

“By my ancestors! Think how that would look if it were cut and polished!” gasped Felix Ming. “An engagement ring for... Ah well, I’ll find
someone
worthy.”

The giant jewel was resting in a shallow crater amid a low mound of heat-fused Durafoam, all that remained of Tom’s great invention. “The flying sapphire!” Bud murmured.

The mountainous, glittering form of the Jatczak Sapphire—as it had somehow become named—invaded and occupied the news and the Net for days. And soon the world’s scientists descended upon it and began to chip away.

During the planetoid crisis, Tom had given only sketchy, partial answers to the many questions about the complex Ninth Light plot and how he had handled it. At last, several days after the touchdown of Petronius, he invited a group of friends to the Swift home for a buffet supper and an explanation.

Tom began on a sober, wistful note. “I’ve never felt more alone in my life. Even after the wind-tunnel accident I wasn’t clear on what
was
happening. I wondered if it was some kind of ‘psychic spying’ by members of the Qalqaram sect. How else could they be getting information that didn’t even
exist
outside somebody’s head?”

“Particularly the Fearing Island aquatometer access codes,” interjected Harlan Ames.

Tom nodded. “Now we know, finally.”

But Bashalli had an objection. “Thomas, didn’t you say it was the attack on the island that spread around those little brain-darts in the first place? How then did they acquire the code
before
the invasion?”

“That was a big missing piece,” replied Tom, “until a few days ago.”

“Dear, why not start from the real beginning?” suggested Tom’s mother. “Make a story of it.”

Tom agreed with a smile. “Okay. I’ll do my best to skip over the unimportant stuff.

“First, Orfeo. This fellow Francesco Orfeo is quite a guy. He’s really the perfect con man—cool, clever, narcissistic, and totally free of conscience. His whole life revolves around the thrill of ‘taking’ the ‘suckers’.”

“Making chumps out of the world,” remarked Bud.

“He’s a genius—his technological work proves that—but he has no human limits. He probably murdered his mentor, the Israeli scientist, just on impulse, as a challenge to himself to see how he could work it out, after the fact, to his best advantage. ‘Collections,’ the deep-secret contacts we have, who I didn’t dare get in touch with when I knew I was bugged, say he’s psychologically addicted to risk.”

“They say it’s a compulsion,” Phil Radnor said. “Gets him up in the morning.” Someone mentioned Attention Deficit Disorder.

Tom continued. “While evading capture in a string of phony identities, he ran across the story of the Bose family and Desh Zai—and their wealth.”

“That there got his attention jest fine!” Chow commented with big Texas sarcasm.

“What could be a bigger challenge to a con artist? So he took the measure of Mr. Zai, and profiled him as naive, self-centered, and basically—well, stupid. Plus very isolated from the world. That’s when he decided to use bits and pieces from the old Qalqaram sect to create the Ninth Light ruse and his Eid-F’lqa identity.”

Sandy said, “It’s hard to believe Mr. Zai believed such a silly thing.”

“Yes,” Tom nodded. “But Orfeo had an ace. He had worked out how to use the nanoelectronic technology to make his cell-sized cranial implants. An amazing design— now that it isn’t inside my head I can appreciate it! The needle ‘stings’ are so minute that they can penetrate the epidermis almost without being noticed, and he coated the filaments with anti-swelling medication. Once somewhere under the skin, they mechanically find their way to their destinations near the sense-input nerves, where they begin their continuous monitoring and transmission.”

“Please don’t stop to explain how they work,” urged Bash dryly. “I wish to hear the plot. Consider that some of us here are addicted to
excitement
.”

The young inventor chuckled. “Well then—Orfeo’s sense-tapping allowed him to simulate enough celestial inspiration to sell Desh Zai and a herd of others—”

“Mostly the Bose family’s camp followers from Bangladesh,” Harlan Ames footnoted.

“—on his higher-being connections and messianic role in the world. So over a few years he became Zai’s trusted adviser.”

“Thereby getting his fingers into the Bose money pot,” added Ames.

“Yup, and all that came with it—including exclusive use of Zai’s yacht as his floating base of operations. Orfeo kept in touch with the Zai compound, and with his ‘born-again’ Qalqaramis, by short wave, touting ‘true’ predictions and miraculous knowledge of secret things, including info about my test flight that he enjoyed leaking to the press, anonymously. He did it for effect. And to breed psychological dependence, I guess.”

“Ready-made faith for the faithless,” Doc Simpson interjected, “helped along by an experimental drug he had acquired from the Syrians, originally developed to treat the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.”

“A drug that affects the will?” asked Anne Swift.

“Well, not directly,” Doc answered. “An
extraordinarily
small nano-dose binds to neural tissue, producing a resistance to distraction—an intense concentration on whatever you’re doing, as with obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“They’ve begun giving the many victims an antidote,” said Tom’s father. “But the doctors have to overcome their combative resistance to being cured. Being insulated from life’s many distractions is apparently perceived as a blissful state.”

“And there you have
u’umat
at its ultimate extreme,” Doc pointed out.  “Orfeo had implanted his sense-tapper units in his minions, naturally. When he ‘monitored’ any sign of betrayal, or got nervous about even the possibility of it—or just to make a point!—he sent a signal that caused the selected nano-unit to dissolve away, releasing a reservoir of the drug that went beyond obsessive concentration to the waking sleeper effect. In excising the units from Tom and Bud, we had to keep that danger in mind.”

“Tomonomo, this story’s going nowhere fast!” complained Sandy teasingly. “How
did
the Light guy get those Fearing Island codes?”

“Allow me to explain this aspect of things, if you will permit,” came a dignified voice. Streffan Mirov had returned for a brief vacation on Earth in order to report to his government and compare notes on the matter with Tom. “I also had my lonely secret, you see. My son Dimitri had come across evidence that some unknown member of the semipermanent Astra-Volkon crew, the Brungarian contingent on Nestria, had been induced to act as agent for some person or organization not authorized by my government. I was determined to uncover this person as my first order of business on Nestria.

“I need not dwell upon my investigations. We have arrested a trusted officer in the science group, a man named Gregor Kharkov, and our gentle if persistent suasions led to a detailed confession.”

“Then Kharkov was the guy who lifted Dr. Jatczak’s findings about the Bartonia planetoid?” asked Bud.

“Yes,” nodded Col. Mirov, “as well as the little one. Of course they were not treated as secrets by my friend Henrik, merely not yet announced to Earth. Acting as the tool of this Orfeo idiot, Kharkov secretly transmitted the data to Orfeo by means of a parallelophone—the PER, that is.”

“Now wait,” objected Arv Hanson. “Isn’t the base PER carefully protected? I know we made the units so that getting into the electronics fouls it up completely.”

“We all forgot something, which became the chink in our armor,” Tom replied. “Remember Kent Rockland’s Private Ear unit, the one that got fried when Base Galileo was attacked? I gave it a patch job, but we shelved it and gave Kent a new one. It never occurred to me that the repair had left the inner security seal out of whack.”

“The traitor located this disused unit and took it apart,” continued Mirov. “He subsequently provided the Ninth Light with the information required to give his monitoring units their phenomenal signaling capacity.”

Mr. Swift said, “The astronomical data was always sent by Orfeo to his acolyte Louis Talmadge for interpretation and verification; it was the sort of celestial ‘truths’ that made the Ninth Light look like a spiritual powerhouse when he told his followers about it in advance of public release. Talmadge leaked the findings to his girlfriend, no doubt unintentionally, and it made its way to Demburton. I imagine Orfeo was furious over the leak. If Talmadge weren’t especially useful, he’d surely have been
u’umat
-ed.”